The humility of supermen

Here’s the problem with Superman as a character: He’s boring.

Sure, all the Superman movies are packed with exciting drama. He’s facing off against world-ending threats, the odds always seem stacked against him, and though he ultimately triumphs, it always seems to have been a close call. Dramatic plots, no question.

Superman movies are exciting, but Superman himself, as a character, generally isn’t. The trouble is that Superman is, traditionally, perfect: a demi-god, who always turns out to have whatever power he needs to defeat whatever enemy he faces. He can fly, he brushes off bullets and explosions, he can survive in the vacuum of space, and he’s always optimistic and kind. The trouble with a perfect character is that it leaves no room for character growth. We may admire people who seem to have it all, but (as Superman literally is) they also strike us as rather alien. They aren’t relatable.

We look up to people who can face any challenge. We love people who have flaws. Making us care about Superman, not just care about what he can do for us, is the challenge for anyone writing a Superman movie.

In the first Christopher Reeve movie Superman (1978), his primary antagonist is Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), who is physically no match for Superman but compensates with his brain. Luthor acquires some Kryptonite and manages to weaken and trap Superman, sidelining him so he can complete his evil plan unmolested. It’s unequivocally evil: he owns a bunch of desert, he wants to transform it into high-priced coastline, so he employs some well-placed missiles to open a major fault line and sink much of California into the ocean.

Superman’s invincibility is problematic for the writer. For the story to be any good, Superman has to be challenged. Kryptonite is an easy fix. I have a ready answer to this question: Who would win in a fight, Superman or Batman? Well, Batman would win if he had any Kryptonite on him, and if not, Superman would. The thing about Batman is, he’s always prepared for everything.

Kryptonite isn’t a character, though. It’s just a mineral, and any human can pick it up and wave it in Superman’s face (if they can find some), so it, too, is not very interesting.

The 1978 film portrays Superman as having a more relatable weakness: Lois Lane (Margot Kidder). He has feelings for her, and when she manages to get herself trapped near a faultline after one of the missile strikes, at first he’s unable to be everywhere at once. She dies while he’s otherwise occupied. He’s distraught, unwilling to let her go, and once again demonstrates that his powers are unbounded: he reverses time in order to save her.

In Superman II (1980), we root for Superman when he faces off against other, superpowered aliens (General Zod and his cronies) who show up to enslave Earth, acting like bullies and jerks, because we want to see Superman kick their asses. Eventually he does. But this wouldn’t work if Superman weren’t challenged, so prior to Zod’s arrival, Superman surrenders his powers to be with Lois. He allows the rays of red Kryptonian sunlight to render him mortal. After that, he can’t overpower a human bully in a diner, much less a Zod. The Kryptonite rays may have been what weakened him physically, but it was his love for Lois that was his true vulnerability.

James Gunn, writer and director of the 2025 Superman, obviously knew the challenge of writing a relatable Superman. Nearly the entire movie focuses on all the ways that the Man of Steel (David Corenswet) is weak. It’s a crash course in teaching humility to the Earth’s most powerful inhabitant. (Spoilers follow.)

The first time we see him, he has lost his first battle. He crashes into the icy tundra, bleeding, barely able to move. He’s only able to return to his Fortress of Solitude, and be healed by a massive dose of focused sunlight, because his super-dog Krypto arrives to rescue him. The man who’s grown accustomed to flying anywhere he likes at super-speed is unceremoniously dragged through the snow like Wile E. Coyote tied to a rocket. Even after he recovers most of his strength, he is defeated again, and is helped to his feet by a mortal. A mortal!

Soon after this, we’re given a window into his relationship with Lois. As in the 1978 film, his love for Lois renders him emotionally vulnerable, but this time we really get to see Superman taken apart. Rather than subject himself to physical mortality as in the 1980 film, in Gunn’s film Superman consents to an interview. And though we’ve seen Lois interview Superman in the earlier films, we didn’t see her pull out all the stops. Her questions are relentless, incisive, and Superman seems outmatched and a bit defensive. Anyone who’s faced a hard line of questioning, before the press or a judge or a job interview, can relate to Superman’s frustration, his struggle to keep his cool.

Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) finds another weakness of Superman after tracking down the Fortress of Solitude, when his assistant The Engineer (Maria Gabriela de Faria) hacks into Superman’s computer and reconstructs a damaged portion of the recording left by his Kryptonian birth parents. In this telling, Jor-El (Bradley Cooper) sent Superman to Earth to become its lord and master. Luthor gleefully reveals this ugly truth to the world. Superman’s vulnerability stems from wanting the world to see him as a good person. This sort of Achilles heel was a prime focus of the TV series The Boys. What do invulnerable superheroes fear? Exposure as debauched hypocrites, or as soulless megalomaniacs.

Not wanting to be seen as a fugitive from justice, Superman surrenders to the authorities. They promptly hand him off to Luthor, who imprisons him and keeps him physically weakened with Kryptonite, recreated by Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan). But again, Kryptonite isn’t a terribly interesting weakness, and Gunn knows this. Superman’s true weakness, as Luthor realizes, is that he cares about other people, and so he forces Superman to watch as he murders someone who was kind to Superman in the past.

For all his dark genius, Luthor may not fully understand the dual nature of compassion. Metamorpho obeys Luthor only because Luthor has his child. When Superman promises to free the child, Metamorpho immediately switches sides.

Adding to the list of Superman’s vulnerabilities is his Earthly parents the Kents (Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Howell). Their relationship with their adopted son Clark feels familiar: they call him, they chat with their boy, and he’s a bit distracted on the phone. Sweet, earnest, caring people who aren’t interested in fame, they want the best for their son, and if all they can offer him is a quiet word of encouragement when things are going badly… well, sometimes that is exactly what he needs. The man who can fly, it seems, also needs to be grounded. Superman is intensely protective of them and their privacy. He worries about what would happen to their simple life if the world knew of his relationship with them. He may be willing to give interviews and talk about himself, but he keeps the Kents a secret, and protecting that secret is another sort of weakness or vulnerability. On the other hand, his relationship with his parents, who (spoilers!) he comes to see as his true parents, is also a source of strength. Even the strongest person needs to be guided by a set of values, humility among them.

To switch genres for just a moment: Some folks go a bit beyond being “Whovian” (fans of Doctor Who) and ask themselves in tricky situations, “What would the Doctor do” (WWTDD) rather than “What would Jesus do”. But even the most ardent fan would acknowledge that, as a character, the Doctor is an imperfect person, and many of his (or her) decisions can be considered mistakes. The Doctor sometimes realizes he (or she) has gone too far, as in The Waters of Mars (released November 2009). David Tennant’s Doctor forgets his humility, allows himself to think there are no constraints on his power. He becomes less of a Superman and a bit more like Lex Luthor. It’s not one of his finer moments.

What drives Lex Luthor? The Hackman portrayal feels, to me, a bit flatter, closer to the child’s idea of an evil villain. I’m thinking of that bit in The Great Muppet Caper, when Kermit asks Nicky Holiday (Charles Grodin) why he’s committing all these crimes. Holiday replies, “Because I’m a villain, it’s pure and simple.” Like much of that movie, which features some fantastic fourth-wall breaks, this is a send-up of villainy. It’s funny because the antagonist knows he is one. Why does the Hackman version of Luthor do what he does? It’s all about greed. His motivation isn’t terribly interesting. He’s more of a foil than a full person.

By comparison, Hoult’s Luthor is driven by… well, greed is clearly a part, but beyond that is a desire for power. Perhaps stronger still, there is hatred and fear. Luthor has been plotting to destroy Superman, not (or not only) because Superman poses an obstacle to one or more of his schemes, but because he considers the very idea of Superman to be a threat to humanity. One might even say the very existence of Superman offends Luthor. Prior to the arrival of this… alien, Luthor might have been the most powerful human on the planet. Now that Superman is around, what are puny humans supposed to do? None of us can compete, but Luthor is certainly going to try. Like most real people, in his own mind, Luthor is the hero and deserves thanks for the service he offers in ridding the world of this dangerous alien.

Some of this may echo today’s unforgivable indulgence in xenophobia, in hatred of anyone who is alien. But Luthor’s hatred of Superman is rather different from, say, Donald Trump’s vilification of illegal immigrants. Trump may attempt to paint immigrants as an invading army, rather than as individuals fighting for survival in a hostile world. But nobody calls them “Supermen”. Trump exaggerates the threat by referencing groups like MS-13. He wants us to believe that all illegal immigrants are organized members of a shadowy group, so we will fear them instead of empathizing.

The threat posed by someone like Superman is obvious. What if, like David Tennant’s Doctor, Superman were to forget his humility and embrace the role imagined for him by Jor-El? Hoult’s Luthor is a believable villain precisely because he has a point. If Superman had decided, in the end, to don the mantle of conqueror, Luthor’s failure (spoilers!!) would have been regrettable rather than a deserved comeuppance.

For those of us who possess limited ability to shape the world, hubris doesn’t carry a lot of risk. The greater one’s power, the more crucial humility is. Try to think of a villain who possesses humility as a major character trait (and not just as an affectation).

Anyone who’s read my writing will know I’m no fan of Donald Trump. He holds the most powerful political office on the planet, and evinces nary a trace of humility. That would be scary even if I agreed with his actions, decisions, and statements (and I disagree with most of them).

Hoult’s Luthor isn’t a politician, though. He’s a rich businessman. Was he patterned after someone specific? Not according to the actor, who described channeling an “amalgamation” of modern tech billionaires (1). They all share some personality traits in common, though, and those necessarily include a huge dose of ambition, often leaving little room for humility.

We don’t have any literal supermen. We do have people with an inordinate amount of power, perhaps too much to be concentrated in any one pair of hands. Listening to Ross Douthat interview Peter Thiel (2), a man who was an early donor to the Seasteading Institute, humility is not the first word that comes to mind, or the tenth. Perhaps becoming that wealthy changes a person.

It’s also possible we’ll see the rise of superhuman machine intelligence within my lifetime. If any machine proves capable of running mental rings around the fictional Lex Luthor, it had better be tempered with humility, able to question its own motives and doubt the correctness of its own decisions.

Returning to the Christopher Reeve days, Superman has faced off against a deadly supercomputer before. In Superman III (1993), Richard Pryor plays Gus Gorman, a character who is a computer genius. After being caught embezzling from the company by its evil CEO Ross Webster (Robert Vaughn), Gorman is roped into helping with Webster's schemes. After Webster's schemes are foiled by Superman, Webster asks Gorman to figure out the formula for kryptonite. In exchange for his continued cooperation, Gorman pulls out some scribbled designs for a supercomputer, smart enough to find the weakness of any opponent, and convinces Webster to build it for him. The supercomputer eventually figures out how to replicate the effects of kryptonite, and seems to be on the verge of killing Superman, when Gorman has an attack of conscience and begins destroying the supercomputer himself.

Gorman is a very different character from Lex Luthor. He stumbles into the role of a villain, and when he sees the consequences of his actions, he recognizes that he’s crossed a line and pulls himself back. For its part, the supercomputer must not have been as bright as all that. While in the act of killing Superman, it proved unable to defend itself against Gorman wielding a firefighting axe.

People like Geoffrey Hinton spent years working on AI technology because they were fascinated by the challenge, and are now starting to wonder if they built something dangerous. They’re a bit more like Gorman (though not as funny). The tech billionaires, like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, seem driven more by ambition and acquisitiveness than by a desire to discover. They build, but what they mostly build is wealth and power. We can’t count on these same tech billionaires, who are running multinational companies building potentially world-changing technology as I write this, from showing the level of humility and self-awareness that Gorman does. They’re not Lex Luthor, but they share traits in common with Luthor. This isn’t surprising as Hoult patterned his portrayal off of them. It’s not hard to imagine that, even if they could see that they’d built something dangerous and destructive, their arrogance would lead them to deny the issue until it was far too late.

Remember, what humanizes Superman is his humility. These tech billionaires might view themselves as supermen, but they’re lacking the essential ingredient. They might not be trying to sink California into the ocean (the plan of Hackman’s Luthor), but they are trying to build their own city in Solano County, and they have already built a sort of libertarian pseudo-country (“special economic zone”) called Próspera in Honduras (3). As these endeavors reveal, their perfect vision of the future is unabashed rule by the rich. If they think about humility at all, they consider it to be for other people. Self-doubt would only slow them down.

The rest of us deserve to have some say in what level of risk we face as a society. That means regulation, imposed by democratically elected legislators. Despite democracy’s missteps (and America’s has certainly stumbled), I would put more trust in the collective conscience of any nation’s populace than I would in these isolated mind-bogglingly rich dudes. Best not to gamble everything on some tech mogul ending up like Lex Luthor, with no Superman in sight.